Best competitor analysis tools help you to find the improvements to be made to your website, To be honest, I don’t like to think of competition, it makes me worry. I choose Matthew McConaughey at the 2014 Oscars who competed with himself as my style (or at least ramble on until the exit music starts).
However, in the business world it is impossible not to think about competition. This is how brands figure out where they stand in the greater market place.
The right software can provide a strategic edge by making your efforts more informed, more accurate, and more efficient. Thus I consulted the people who actually do competitor analysis. Over the course of having the conversations, a lot of research into the market, and hands-on testing, I managed to compile the most competitor analysis tools that are available which will help you get the competitive edge.
Yet, I will not promise an anxiety-less experience; however, every single one of these options will make it possible to get valuable information about your competitors.
The most important thing – what a good competitor analysis tool should be?
The term “competitor analysis” is pretty vague, so I’ve segmented these software options into a few categories related to key elements of competitive market analysis:The term “competitor analysis” is pretty vague, so I’ve segmented these software options into a few categories related to key elements of competitive market analysis:
- Social media monitoring: Tools built to assess competitors’ social media presence in terms of engagement rate, number of followers and mentions on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are available.
- SEO analysis: Softwares that can allow the marketer to track the competitor’s web presence and content marketing performance.
- Direct marketing: The use of competitors’ email, sms and advertising campaign details reporting apps.
- Competitor intelligence: Platforms for getting they competitor’s financial data, performance history and market positioning.
The majority of these tools are classified within the SEO and Competition Intelligence areas because they are the ones that have the most influence on our business goals. But whichever group these tools fall into, they all have these traits in common: But whichever group these tools fall into, they all have these traits in common:
- Comparison capabilities: Every platform has its own collection of exclusive tools that can be used to deal with the competitor-related data. They, in turn, can help create competitive strategies.
- Novel insights: Every data point gives some reporting and thus allows one sticking out with competitors’ information.
- Sales/marketing use case: Information users need to be extracted and used to impact some part of sales or marketing channels.
- Ease of use: The product should have turn-key functionality with easy-to-use interface which is dynamic yet accessible.
I have spent my time on the research of those categories and I have been able to test virtually all of the apps. Additionally to seek more perspectives from a diversity of professionals I interviewed around sixty industry experts such as marketing or sales managers, data and analytics VPs, SEO consultants, and senior leaders of companies. This list is based largely on my study as well as, their recommendations.
A quick overview of top best competitor analysis tools
Name | Best for | Standout feature | Pricing |
Ahrefs | SEO | Competitive Analysis tool | From $99/month |
Earnest Analytics | Consumer spending data | Historical consumer credit card transaction data | Pricing by request |
Morning Consult | Survey data | High-frequency survey data | Explore our pricing: Individuals at $129/month, Teams at $104/user/month (5+ seats), and Enterprises at $42/user/month (20+ seats) |
Owler | Competitor research on a budget | Detailed competitor profiles | Free plan available; paid plans from $35/month |
Owletter | Email campaign analysis | Automatic competitor email capture | From $19/month |
Semrush | All-in-one competitor analysis | Market Explorer tool | From $129.95/month |
Similarweb | Actionable market research | Suite of actionable data segmented by use case | From $125/month |
Sprout Social | Social listening | Well-integrated AI | From $249/month |
Wappalyzer | Tech stack monitoring | Instant access to website tech stacks | From $250/month |
The ultimate tool for actionable insights from competitor and market research
Similarweb (Web)
Similarweb pros:
- The market data is accessible and is segmented in different groups based on the application.
- Reliable, dynamic data sources
- User-friendly interface
Similarweb cons:
- Granular, niche data can be harder to pinpoint because of the limited number of websites making it available.
Most of the industry professionals I surveyed among were bringing up Similarweb over and over again. The company itself reports that it collects 10 billion digital signals a day, analyzes 2 TB data per day for which it employs the team of 200 data scientists.The result? A vast industry of business information that can be actively used.
All this data boils down into five Similarweb product segments:All this data boils down into five Similarweb product segments:
- Digital Research Intelligence: The market information, including the customer journeys, target brand audiences, and competitive landscape, is analyzed.
- Digital Marketing Intelligence: The data that is SEO-related which includes the analysis of competitors, keyword research and PPC.
- Sales Intelligence: Data that is there all throughout the sales pipeline, includes lead generation, lead enrichment, and sales engagement.
- Stock Intelligence: Dashboards to monitor the variety of key performance indicators (KPI) in stock performance.
- Shopper Intelligence: Digital marketing analytics, such as consumer data, desired actions, and on-page SEO, help marketers reach their users.
All this data utility is why digital marketing consultant Velizara Tellalyan uses Similarweb for comprehensive market intelligence: “I use this dashboard to pull and merge data from various sources that helps me to compare my direct competitors locations within wider visual framework. Here I analyze their marketing mix, audience engagement, etc. I am also able to benchmark my customer’s PPC search ads and display creatives with those of competitors using this tool.”
Anything with the weight of gold in it is a good thing for a business to have and Similarweb is one source that many sales and marketing managers in those businesses rely on. Its data is robust and reliable, and its interfacing is friendly and easy to use. Besides, as opposed to some of the niche consumer data analytics solutions, it might be not as deep in the intelligence some of those tools are, but nevertheless it is difficult to exceed when it comes to sales and marketing information consumer data is concerned.
Similarweb pricing: Start ($125/per month), Professional ($333/ per month), Team (by request), Enterprise (by request)
Best competitor analysis tools for social listening and consumer insights
Sprout Social (Web)
Sprout Social pros:
- Deep into the heart of the competitors and here the general trends too.
- AI-powered analytics and automations
Sprout Social cons:
- Relatively expensive
- The most important aspects are usually behind a pay wall, these include reporting and X analysis of trends.
It is going to be hard to speak against checking Sprout Social for this category. Marketers like Simon Bacher, CEO and co-founder of Ling, describe it as the industry-wide automated listening software for social media.
“Sprout Social” enables us to closely follow up brand mentions, hashtags, keywords, and other elements through various media according to Simon. It can help you get an understanding of how consumers perceive both your and your competition’s brands.” Through AI, Sprout Social can search and analyze competitor data. The results you get is actionable information about what works and doesn’t for your competitor and how you can flex your muscle by concentrating on the avenues which they are leaving open to you.
Sprout Social gives you an insight into not only what your competitors post but also how their posts have changed users’ sentiments and into what they changed the latter. Competitors it’s good to learn from their successes and failures which turn them into a great help for the industry as well.
One good thing to notice in Sprout Social is that it uses AI extensively in its software. Sprout Social utilizes its AI which has understood the data points over a decade to offer detailed sentiment analysis and trends identification and behavior patterns. Equipped with your knowledge of rival performance factors such as audience sentiment, response rate, engagement and share of voice, the AI can be exploited to produce content ideas, create content, respond to users and perform routine jobs.
Utilizing it well, it, although with a premium price, will be worth it for those companies that are very much relying on theirs social media presence.
A top best competitor analysis tools for SEO
Ahrefs (Web)
Ahrefs pros:
- The Content Gaps Analysis tool encourages the discovery of content gaps and the creation of more authoritative, high-quality content.
- Set of broad SEO tools
- Keywords database that is constantly rich and up-to-date backlinks profiles
Ahrefs cons:
- Premium price tag
- Competitive analysis is the only and very small part of its functionality, in particular.
If Sprout Social is the benchmark for social monitoring, then Ahrefs is commonly identified as the premium SEO competitor analysis tool. This is the product that I start my stock with, and it is the product that was most recommended by the industry professionals, when I did a survey.
Just like Ben Poulton, SEO consultant and founder of Intellar did for me, “Ahrefs is my go-to software for SEO, and their functionalities for competitor analyses is handy to the point. It is easy for me to create comprehensive competitive benchmarking by keyword and category. This will absolutely show the gaps, underperforming areas or highly competitive terms we do well on but want to make sure we keep
Can other software manage to such an extent? Sure. This is also the Ahrefs advantage over its competitors as Poulton noted: “They have a sizable keyword database and more detailed backlink metrics”. To date, I’ve tried several other competitors, but I usually back to Ahrefs for competitor analysis for the same reasons.
I utilize the Competitive Analysis feature to learn about new content points and to improve the current content, the Site Explorer to delve into competitor’s pages to see how well they perform and Ahrefs extension to get all the in-SERP data. Put simply: Ahrefs is the richest and most accessible tool-set of all the available tools for SEO competitor analysis.
Ahrefs pricing: Lite ($99/month), Standard ($199/month), Advanced ($399/month), Enterprise ($999/month).
Best competitor analysis tools of email campaigns
Owletter (Web)
Owletter pros:
- Automatic email competitor campaign capture and organization
- Unique competitor email analytics and trend graphs are provided .
- Custom keyword alerts
Owletter cons:
- The lowest level is not very extensive.
- Unable to give private insights into metrics such as responses.
There’s one important aspect of competitor analysis that I haven’t touched on yet: owl-based software names.And also email marketing. Owletter merge both into a single smooth package.
Owletter is a focused platform for email campaign analysis that is a very powerful means for companies that rely heavily on email outreach. Just pick your competitors and the software will collect all the mailing list bulletins (actually, it is more like a net than a bird of prey, if you think about it- “Netter” was taken, so I decided to call it “Netter”).
Once your competitor marketing communiqué repository is in place, Owletter tracks them down and analyzes them. This is the chance to gather the emails and then separate them to follow competitor agents’ efforts and imitate what is good. Even if you just do a keyword-based monitoring to receive an alert when they mention terms that matter to your company.
Having worked in email marketing for quite a while, I can say, with confidence, that there can be more guessing than perspectives even in creating the best-designed campaigns. With Owletter, you can remove the need to guess what successful businesses are doing by seeing it live. With Owletter, you can monitor activity metrics like spam status, send times, send days, frequency and seasonality.
In general, the pricing is quite preferable, with a few exceptions for Starter tier’s monthly roundup, single alert, and one-year storage. However, Owletter is a specialized tool that provides lots of very useful data to email marketers.
Owletter pricing: Starter($19/month), Pro($39/month), Unlimited($79/month)
The best competitor analysis tools for finding out information about competitors when on a tight budget
Owler (Web)
Owler pros:
- Useful free plan
- The detailed competitor profiles with linking them to relevant actors.
- Search for competitors according to particular metrics.
Owler cons:
- Shallow depth compared to the high-price ones
- The interface speed could be improved.
This is just one of the many owl application, and no, I am not going to make owl pun. Yet, I will specify that Owler is a better competitor intelligence tool for businesses of a slim sales budget.
In his portfolio of choice competitor research tools, Ling co-founder Simon Bacher thought Owler worthy to be included. He described Owler as a tool that could be used for tracking market trends, performance metric performance, and industry news. This tool was specially designed to help companies get more qualified leads, and the users can also set up track and alerts for both competitors and potential customers.
Owler provides valuable data on capital raised, revenue, employees and public updates. Are you sure which companies are your competitions? Owler charts competitive relationships which allows you to browse through related companies with your industry trends. You can go as deep if you need to by the metrics that interest you including location, size, revenue, and business sector. But it’s mostly user-friendly just expect the interface to be a bit laggy.
The free plan alone is a rare find and the paid plan is incredibly affordable. Owler is nearly shockingly well priced. For larger sales teams, Owler Max also comes with a CRM and 20 extra integrations to help them stay on top of their lead acquisitions and keep their leads more organized. Owler will not give to market depth as you can get from Similarweb and enterprise level firms but for pure competitor monitoring, Owler is (not hoot) a good and affordable option.
Owler pricing: Community edition (free), Pro ($35/month), Max (pricing on request)
Best competitor analysis tools resource for consumer spending data
Earnest Analytics (Web)
Earnest Analytics pros:
- Consumer based credit card express transactional data
- AI-based benchmarking and insights
- Free trial available
Earnest Analytics cons:
- High price tags, and have to go to the sales agent for the price quotes.
Some events simply beg for a pie from Costco (yup you got it right, theme is consistent here). For many it’s a great time to put to use that annoying new recipe from NY T which has taken one whole day to come wrong. Likewise, in some scenarios, out-of-the-box competitor reporting from third party vendors can be adequate. For some, you get to touch raw data only to assemble it, while for others you won’t.
Earnest Analytics is not for the weak-hearted! The platform gives you the ability to put together your financial analyses and projections using credit card data as this helps it. As NicheMerch Founder James Riso explains, that is the advantage of having a process that allows you to “accurately measure revenue growth, transaction size, and retention rates.”
Which is great because all of the trends are made available for all the companies, and you can go even further back to 2016 for much competitor’s data as well. This built with real spending data you can put together reports that are high leverage figures which will accurately indicate, based on historical data, the purchase volume and the revenue growth instead of mere speculations.
On the other hand, if the pie analogy doesn’t make sense to you then it’s always good to mention that Earnest Analytics also does more than just present raw data. The comprehensive AI-powered benchmarking, market share calculations, analysis of consumer behavior, and macroeconomic environment context will turn it into the alternative data one-stop-shop you won’t find with any other product of this range.
Earnest Analytics pricing: Pricing by request (probably very expensive)
Best competitor analysis tools for reviewing customer satisfaction data
Morning Consult (Web)
Morning Consult pros:
- High-frequency survey data
- Collaborative interface
Morning Consult cons:
- Limited free access
As you see I was very much dedicated to quantitative data so far but this list is going to bring numbers out of the game. That’s where decision intelligence platform Morning Consult is a great solution.
Morning Consult gives top-quality survey data that is acquired with high frequency, thus offering the most powerful, relevant and up-to-date qualitative research data. According to James, it allows the analytics specialists to have access to “attitudes related to your brand and that of others as well as the trends in your market with quite useful contextual data on the respondents.”
To boost the productivity of the team and obtain all relevant information, Morning Consult provides this data via the easy-to-use Intelligence platform. While at this point those who are interested in incorporating the intel in other platforms can use the product’s API.
The dashboard is a collection of survey data reviewed and clean by the internal data scientists to produce clear interpretations with implementable strategies. Consequently, this uniquely rich data and analysis yield deeper customer understanding coupled with more reliable predictive modeling.
If you get actionable data, your recent user survey data is just as valuable to you as Morning Consult.
Morning Consult pricing: Individuals at $129 per month, Teams starting at $104/user/month with a minimum of 5 seats, Enterprise at $42/user/month with a minimum of 20 seats).
Best competitor analysis tools to Monitor the Tech Stack for Competitor Analysis
Wappalyzer (Web)
Wappalyzer pros:
- The immediate access to the website’s tech stack and contact info.
- It also hosts a host of commercial market data classes.
- It could be offered in a web form, a browser extension, integration platform, and API.
Wappalyzer cons:
- Pricey
- Even supplemental data is not as good as market data platforms.
- Reporting may take a long time to execute.
Though this product has been made for getting to know competitors while the other products of this list were for studying what competitors are doing, the latter shows you how competitors are doing what they are doing. Wappalyzer is a bit more specific in the sense that it showcases what tech they include in the process.
Wappalyzer is a program that gives you the technology stack your opponents’ web pages use, the very tools you and your competitors use, as a result. Pay attention to a competitor who’s gobbling up market share like none other and observe payment processing software to their CMS. The other thing one can do while developing a company is to peer behind the curtain to see how to construct an online following.
Further to software recommendations, data can be used to create filtered website, email and contact lists curated by software type, social media presence, contact information, and industry keywords. For example, you may lookup to WordPress sites popularity, then to create an application that is premium WordPress, you may submit your application to each of these sites. Using the parameter ‘search_width’, the wider the search, the longer the time consumed by the report. Not that I am complaining though, one of them could take up to an hour or so.
Want to have more than the software specs only? Wappalyzer not only gives you such extra insights but also information about market research, competitor analysis, data enrichment and website monitoring. On top of all these, you can extend the platform by browser extension, API, or direct integration and you can automate the workflow to speed up your search engine. This is of the most recent offerings on the list. It could be very useful to some people.
Wappalyzer pricing: Tier 1: Pro ($250/month), Tier 2: Business ($450/month), Tier 3: Enterprise ($850/month)
What is more, Google Analytics apps can become your competitors?
Definitely, Google has a suite of tools that can be employed for the performance of some competitor analysis elements. Here are a few:
- Google Search: Another starting point you can try to go deep into your competitors’ web presence is by using a simple Google search.
- Search Console: Go through competitor domains to find out which kewords they’re ranking for.
- Google Trends: See what topics and queries your competitors have been publishing about.
- Google Analytics: See how the competitors’ ads are performing utilising Auction Insight Reports.
- Google Merchant Center: The Price Competitiveness Report gives you an idea on how your pricing structure stands to the competition, whereas the Best Sellers list shows which products are doing the best.
- Google News: Alert your social media mentions, keyword mentions and your competitors mentioning topics within your market and see when they are published.
In a nutshell the answer to the question is picking the appropriate competitor analysis tools for the task at hand.
It should quickly become obvious that every competitor analysis tool has its own specific area for application. Therefore, the choice has to be made based on how much do you know about competitors, what you do with this information, and your budget.
Earlier, in this regard, I mentioned that there are two major categories of tools, viz, for social media monitoring, SEO analysis, direct marketing and competitor intelligence. However, those really break down even further into two types of competitive analysis: However, those really break down even further into two types of competitive analysis:
- Digital marketing analysis: Using Ahrefs, Semrush, Sprout Social, or Owletter.
- Market data analysis: Similarweb, Owler, Earnest Analytics, Morning Consult or Wappalyzer are some of the tools.
These tools can be a life-saver, as any one of them is just fine. but no matter which one, don’t forget that it’ll get you more when you automate your competitor analysis.